Reading Notes from Shaul Magid’s THE IMPORTANCE OF EXILE: ESSAYS FROM A DISTANCE
These are my reading notes, collection of resources, and random thoughts from Shaul Magid’s book.
p. 14: The provocative statement by Gershom Scholem: “Zionism was a calculated risk in that it brought about the destruction of the reality of Exile.” This statement comes close to Magid’s central thesis. Zionism opposes Judaism’s exilic existence with its dangers and precariousness. But exile is also essential to Judaism. The author is saying that when Zionists jettison exile something essential is lost. I’m reading Magid as a Christian. I wonder whether Magid’s argument against “nationalistic messianism applies equally to Christianity. Is exile necessary for followers of Jesus who was born into the exilic experience of Israel as it languished under Roman oppression. Jesus followers, for their first 300 years were a distinct population and Roman authorities persecuted them on and off. The faith flourished under these conditions.[i]
p. 18: He teases apart Zionism and the nation state, Israel. Zionism is an ideology and Israel is a country. I would assume that Zionism confers upon Israel a kind of spiritual exceptionalism. Zionism holds that the nation of Israel is officially Jewish rather than a secular state.
p. 20: In the nation’s for, Jewish leaders realized that Zionism need not be anti-liberal and chauvinistic. That intellectual care dedicated to distinguishing the state from the religion has faded and today Zionism is a conservative affair granting Jewish proprietary religious control over all of Palestine.
Magid begins to hint here how the concept of exile (Galut) can have a psychological and flexible aspect. One can, so he suggests, live in Jerusalem and be in exile. This is because exile has an eschatological quality. Every Jew lives in exile all of the time because nowhere does the Jewish ideal of life already exist.
In the case of Christian nationalism, creating a White Christian ethnostate would undermine the Christian ideal of egalitarianism. It would create a political disadvantage for whole classes of people like progressives or Muslims. Creating political privilege for Christians, would have the effect of creating an equal and opposite condition for others—Blacks, Hispanics, Asians etc. Making the United States officially Christian would place about half the population at some sort of disadvantage. The worldwide mission vision of Christian faith would be undercut by a political mechanism that would be perpetually busy figuring out who could and who couldn’t vote and hold office, enter or leave the country, acquire property or wealth.
p. 22: Magid mentions an effort by rabbis following the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem to re-center Exile as a Jewish essential. I’d like to know more about this effort.
My core question of Magid is whether Christians share with Jews the “necessity of exile.” Will his insights about modern Israel and Zionism apply equally to Christians worldwide. There is no effort today to establish one Christian homeland to be in a specific place or country. The sheer size of the Christian population worldwide makes it difficult to see Christians as a persecuted sub-culture. There is no Christian diaspora. In the United States where 80% of the population is baptized, it’s difficult to see how Christians are persecuted.
Might Magid be thinking that Jews will always attract antisemitism and Christians will not attract persecution everywhere they exist. I wonder what Magid will credit for the pervasiveness of antisemitism.
Has Zionism Exhausted Itself?
p. 27: Magid’s answer to this question is “yes.” He begins by saying that Zionism, which is the establishment of Palestine as a homeland and nation for the Jewish people, which at the same time provides rights and services to non-Jewish people, has not succeeded. Israel as Magid tells it is hardly “liberal.” Israel’s controversial Nation State or Nationality Bill of 2018 is a good example of the theocratic conservatism of Israel today. The Green Line Law was the boundary that separated Israel from the lands it conquered in the 1967 war. The J Street organization is a liberal American group founded to provide alleviation from constant rancor between Israel and Arab groups. Two factors keep moving Israel to the political right: elections that place conservatives in office, and the popular rejection of media reports of pervasive crisis.
p. 30: Magid is building an argument that liberal Zionism is now unfeasible. It may have been the framework for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in 1948, but it is now out of reach. Jews in America appear to favor Israel’s lurch to the right.
Four categories of Zionists:
- Troubled committed (The original liberal Zionists, wed to the 2-state solution, believes that exclusively Jewish dominance is temporary, once those in this category come to grips with the entrenchment of a Jewish theocracy the more they become the troubled uncommitted)
- Untroubled committed (Settlers who desire power and winning)
- Troubled Uncommitted (Those who have given up on Zionism)
- Untroubled Uncommitted (Those disinterested in Israel entirely)
p. 31 Magid sees the 2-state solution as unfeasible or utopian. Magid says, “Liberal Zionism is a failure on liberal grounds if it cannot offer those who live within Israel’s borders the very same rights of self-determination that Zionism claims for Jews.” (p. 35)
“Maybe, then, the problem with liberal Zionism is not liberalism but Zionism itself? Maybe the ideology upon which the state was founded—the ideology, in all its multitudinous facets, which gave birth to the Jewish state—is no longer able to offer solutions for the present reality?” (p.36)
The founding vision, a now ageing idea, may no longer be feasible.
Magid: “Can Israel be a state where Jews have autonomy and partial sovereignty but not be a Jewish state? That is, can one reconceptualize Israel, even if its name may change, as a state of all its citizens without undermining the right of Jewish self-determination? I think so, and many early Zionists thought so as well, as we’ll see.” In this vision Israel would become like a progressive America. All sorts and conditions of citizens would have rights, services, opportunities. This would include Jews. Jews in Israel would realize all the goals of settling in Israel in the first place, notably safety and their Palestinian neighbors would enjoy the same benefits.
p. 37: The Jewish population in such a 1 state solution would need to repeal the Nation State Bill of 2018 as a starter. And they would need to cease in the beginning to see the Palestinians as the core problem.
p. 39: He moves on to articulate a challenge that confronts the liberal perspective on Israel’s challenges: There exists an unspoken fusion of ideological Zionism and concern for running the state of Israel as a country.
Excursus: Magid’s articulation of these issues opens insight into the situation with evangelicals in the United States where there is an unacknowledged fusion between White American capitalism and nationalism and Christian faith. People can slip unconsciously between Conservative Christian faith, American nationalism, consumerism, White racial chauvinism, and conservative politics.
In these words, Magid completely shows his cards, which, I predict will endure throughout the book:
“Zionism is essentially, in my view, a chauvinistic ideology at its core. It argues for a Jewish right to a land where other people dwell (what Chaim Gans calls “proprietary Zionism”). It argues for exclusive Jewish self-determination through assured majoritarianism, while at the same time promising democracy for all. It makes a historical argument that is really a cover for a theological claim.” (p. 39)
The Palestinian population in Israel before 1967 was small and not the focus of concern by Zionists. The 1967 War brought many more Palestinians under Israel’s control, so many that they could not be expected to be absorbed into the Jewish citizenry.
Beginning in the 1970s sentiment similar to that which brought Gush Emunim, founded in 1974, into being became the norm. Jewish dominance distressed the liberal Zionists.
p. 42: He begins to flesh out his vision of Jewish self-determination without tying it to a homeland. He wants to shelve Zionism entirely. Magid feels that this self-determination can exist without having a proprietary grip on territory. This he claims is closer to Jewish religious values than any Zionist alternative. The key appears to be to surrender sovereignty or exclusive sovereignty over territory and to carve out an existence that doesn’t depend on territory.
I see nothing essentially Jewish about Magid’s proposal. Could we not equally say that Christianity has an essential exilic character and should provide self-determination for its adherents regardless of their nation of existence.
Chapter Two: My Tragic Love Affair with Zionism
This chapter is Magid’s recounting of his spiritual journey that begin with his fascination with Heradi Judaism, which is an anti-Zionist, anti-politics form of strictly religious Jewish faith. After a while in Israel in the Heradi world, Magid moved into the thought world of Rabbi Rav Kook who was much more optimistic about Zionism.
p. 56 Story of going to a shop in Nablus, Palestinian territory in the 1980’s with a friend in Arab attire and feeling tension. He also felt something else emanating from the land. The Palestinians feel a deep rootedness in the land and Magid felt that.
Documentary 1913: Seeds of Conflict,
Some of his experiences in Israel brought him to the realization that Zionism comes at a price, it’s the price of needing to view the Palestinians as part of the backdrop, to erase them despite their attachment to the land.
“Zionism came at a price—a price that most of its adherents did not even know existed. It is not even that the Arab was seen as the enemy per se; rather, there was a sense that Arabs don’t (or shouldn’t) even exist in the land of Israel. Zionism was not a project of eradication as much as a project of erasure. And not necessarily in a hateful way, but more in a romantic way. In that sense, it is a classic case of colonialism.” P. 59
Excursus: So, suppose the Christian nationalist project goes forward? Even if it is gloriously successful, it will entail grave spiritual sacrifice. The United States already rests on the twofold foundation of Manifest Destiny, which pushed the indigenous peoples from the land, and slavery that robbed African descent people by the millions of their labor, bodies, culture, and families. Now the proposal is to forcibly push about half of the population of the United States into a lower caste status in order to make even more concrete the privilege of White evangelicals headed by male elites.
Not even all Whites will enjoy the new status. Christian nationalists will identify liberals, intellectuals, and about half of the Christian population as inferior or deviant and will be in for punishment or denigration.
Part of the price that White nationalism will exact from the United States is that Christian Nationalist America will be neither be quite Christian nor America any longer.
p. 60: Magid talks about the dissonance which needed to balance the gnawing feeling that something was not quite right with the constant din of the optimism that Israelis were living on the cutting edge of history.
Now, here’s a difference between Christianity and Judaism. Magid talks about a spirituality of the land itself. He uses the expression “land of Israel,” rather than the “nation Israel.” While subtle, he has mentioned twice, a spiritual benefit that comes with being in Israel. Somehow, there is an uplift or healing that comes with being in the land.
So, in the years that Magid was a hippie, he entered Judaism and lived in Israel attracted to the spiritual qualities of the faith.
the fundamental precept that the land belongs to us—was, by definition, inequitable. P. 70
p. 71: Magid’s service in the IDF during the first Intifada gave him a first-hand look at how the military embodied a kind of domination over Palestinians.
At length he abandoned, at great personal price, Zionism completely. Zionism had its time; it did its work; now it can be set aside, along with Manifest Destiny, colonialism, and any number of other chauvinistic and ethnocentric ideologies of the past. P. 72
the very heart of Zionism, which is based on a claim of ownership and thus privilege.
The chapter ends with an objection of the status of perpetual Jewish exceptionalism that comes with a hyper concern over antisemitism that fuels the nationalistic Zionism of today.
Chapter Three: How to Separate Jewishness from Zionism
p. 77: With the Netanyahu government and an increasingly right-wing government in Israel the egalitarian underpinnings of the two-state solution are receding into obsolescence. It seems that as intellectuals give up on the two-state solution the viability of Zionism lessens. Magid thinks that there is no possibility for Zionism at this point.
p. 78: Podhoretz wrote that American Jews and the American public in general hold a simplistic view of Zionism, namely that it is necessary as a way to protect Jews from antisemitism anywhere in the world. What is increasingly erased is the intellectual movement that is counter-Zionist. Magid, of course, is part of this.
Excursus: In reading about the Bundists in Eastern Europe and their counter Zionist views, I’m wondering whether Christian Nationalism in its desire to suppress all non-white groups is in fact an escape from the Great Commission, which has a global vision and embraces all peoples as possible brothers and sisters in Christ.
p. 80: Even among Zionists there is disagreement. Magid gives the example of the territorialist who argued for the settlement of Jewish peoples on any land and not necessarily the land of Palestine.
p. 81 Zionism is a broad-based sociopolitical and cultural project, while the State of Israel is a nation-state like other nation-states.
Excursus: If America became a White Christian ethnostate, Americans would lose the ability to criticize both the country and Christianity. And Whiteness for that matter.
p. 84: Judith Butler observes that the ethnostate Israel is not able to be criticized even by Jews themselves without attracting the criticism that they are siding with antisemites. Magid expands on Butler’s ideas, influenced by Arendt, which advance Jewish existence in diaspora as the ideal. Butler expands on the fact that a Jewish ethnostate admits no criticism from fellow Zionists, which further banishes liberal minded people.
An important part of Jewish identity is being different in a society that emphasizes conformity and sameness. Not being in charge and enjoying
The first five centuries of the Common Era in the Persian Empire as reflected in the Babylonian Talmud, Jews struggled mightily to understand what it meant to cohabitate with a dominant culture.
p. 89: “While this may not have been true for many whose Jewishness centered on religion and ritual, it was certainly the case for figures like Arendt, Benjamin, Levinas, and Levi, who serve as Butler’s ideational template.”
Of course, Jews who continue to live within another dominant culture come under the criticism of accommodation by the Zionist thought that refusing to gather with and come into the security of a homeland and a dominating government is to accept an inferior existence.
From Judith Butler’s page on Amazon: Thinkers Butler engages in Parting Ways: Edward Said, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, and Mahmoud Darwish.
In my view, Butler’s theory of cohabitational diasporism is one option that we should take seriously, not just as an expression of Jewishness in the diaspora, but in Israel as well.
In many ways, Magid is weighing in for a nationwide existence of ordinariness, or at least an existence that is not positioned to dominate the people around. Isn’t this the same stance that Jesus took in the temptations. He declined to grasp celebrity, power, or wealth. His ministry was conducted to bring salvation through ordinariness.
Chapter Four: On Jews, Un-Jews and Anti-Jews
p. 99: “gatekeepers of Zionist Jewish identity try to write anyone who doesn’t share their nationalist project out of Judaism.”
Love the language. Evangelicals, or worse Christo-fascists are the gatekeepers of Christian identity who try to write anyone who doesn’t share their nationalist project out of Christianity.”
p. 102: “Zionism—meaning support for the State of Israel as a Jewish state—has become a more essential marker of Jewish identity than Jewish practice, or any other criteria.” To Christianize: Christian Nationalism, meaning support for making the US officially and legally Christian, has become in some circles a more essential marker of Christian identity than Christian practice, or any other criteria.
I’m wondering if these separate essays are repetitive because they were separate. It’s as if Magid was working out his argument over several essays and then merged them. He has said several times now that Judaism in the last century has not always been supportive of a Jewish homeland or nation, namely Zionism.
p. 105: Some Zionists have explicitly felt that returning to Palestine and having a Jewish State serves as a replacement of Judaism. This is not far-fetched. During the Babylonian Exile it was believed that being carried off to Mesopotamia was tantamount to losing one’s religion. Judaism was discovered away from Palestine.
p. 106: Today’s “heresy hunting” ignores, dismisses, or is simply unaware of the utterly radical, and revolutionary, nature of Zionism itself.
Judaism is an ethnicity, a spiritual practice, a residency in Palestine, a citizenship in Israel,
He talks about the media environment to which younger people, notably Jewish young adults, are exposed to and how this has moved them away from blind allegiance to the Zionist party line that prevails in the United States.
Chapter Five: “The Grand Collaboration: Where Boycott and Settlement Movements Unwittingly Work to the Same Ends”
Expressions like the Israeli-Arab conflict and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict are obsolete. This is due to the shift to the political right in Israel. This shift locates the Israeli government on the side of the settlers. Other indicators of the shift:
P. 119: Only the Camp David accords made any real progress between Israel and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. (1978)
p. 121: “So while the conflict between Israel and the Arab world is making progress, there is a stuck situation between Israel and the Palestinian population.”
“…If Israel is able to normalize its relations with enough Arab countries and reverse the Arab League’s 1967 resolution against the recognition of Israel, the regional pressure to end the occupation disappears.”
p. 121: He equates the settler movement and the BDS movements. I’m pretty shaky on the logic here. Isn’t the BDS movement an anti-settler economic penalty?
p. 123: “The goal of BDS is anti-normalization: to prevent Israel from participating in normal political and economic relations as long as it is engaged in an illegal and immoral occupation.” (p. 124). The settlers are saying the same thing. They are saying that the state, in allowing the persisting existence of the Palestinian people, is delegitimizing itself. Apparently, “homeland” is a step to a further goal, namely Jewish theocratic nationhood. The refusal to take this step condemns Israel’s government.
The settlers feel that the West Bank is disputed territory within Israel. In settling there, they often claim to have neighborly relations with their Palestinian neighbors. There are other religious Zionists who live elsewhere who have militant view that all of Palestine is Israel a nation state that privileges Jews and at best tolerates non-Jew residents.
p. 126: The settlement movement makes a military occupation in the West Bank into a Jim Crow situation, where Israeli citizens settle into disputed territory and have citizen rights. It would be like Americans settling on Indian reservations.
Can American citizens settle on Indian Reservations?
p. 127: The Liberal Zionist Narrative: Israel is a homeland and nation-state for Jewish people. The arrangement preserves land for Palestinians, but not citizenship rights. All Americans buy into this scheme.
The increasingly dominant conservative narrative is that all of Palestine is a Jewish theocracy. Palestinians are a lower caste with rights as meted out by the dominant Jewish leadership.
Chapter 6: Who Owns the Holy Land?
This chapter will put forward an alternative model for who owns the holy land.
P. 135: There is a view that recovery of the land or recovery of the condition of Israel before the Exile is the eschatological ideal of the Jewish people and to do so both negates the legitimacy of the diaspora but also negates Judaism itself.
“Thus, one reading of Dinur’s statement is that Zionism is Judaism—meaning that Zionism supersedes and contains Judaism (rather than the other way around), or alternatively is Judaism’s fulfillment. (p. 136).
The Torah makes it clear that God owns the land and if Israel fails to fulfill its covenant responsibilities God may eject them from it.
Abraham is from Haran, Mesopotamia and is a sojourner in Canaan.
p. 139: The question of which people is the indigenous one is much discussed. Jews sometimes consider themselves as the de-colonizers and indigenous population.
p. 142: Up until the 6-day war Jewish intellectuals tended to see the land as granted by God as a homeland for the Jewish people, to be shared with others. Buber’s view is that Zionism is properly a religious outlook. He saw the land as granted to the Jewish people as a trust and a project. The Jewish people as caretakers of the land. It is to become what God intends for the land.
The Leviticus instructions for the Jubilee Year and Sabbatical observance forbid selling the land away from retrieval. The land simply does not belong to the Jewish occupants.
Excursus: Surely, Jesus picks up on these jubilee ideas in many of his parables of stewards and their management of the Master’s land.
The ties to the environmental crisis are obvious. Plunder or the destruction of the land is clearly addressed in the Jubilee regulations.
Martin Buber’s position was that the land was lent to the Jewish people. They could make homes in it providing that they behaved like God. This ethical imperative is first seen in Genesis 1.26f when man is made in the image and likeness of God.
Excursus: The applicability of these insights to the climate crisis are obvious. All of humanity is made on the pattern of God’s being. More precisely, we’re made in God’s image. As god’s icons we are also God’s partners in the ongoing creation of the world. We are stewards of the land, which includes the peoples of the world. We are to make these what God longs for. We are to make of the land what pleases God and advances the project of creation.
The Land is holy, not the state. It is incumbent upon the Jews to share what God has given them.
Chapter 7: “Are the Jews an Oppressed People Today?”
Magid calls the image of the perpetually oppressed Jew a trope that continues today despite the fact of impressive success by Jews in the United States today.
p. 158: The oppression of the Jews traces to the Hebrew Bible and servitude in Egypt, a condition that required God to intervene. Then, after a few brief centuries of autonomy, Jews went into exile, a condition that endures to the present.
The question I ask in this chapter is whether the meaning implied by “antisemitism”—of both hatred and oppression—remains accurate to the reality of Jewish life today; and if not, what might then constitute the reality of antisemitism today? (pp. 158-159).
Magid is going to argue that oppressive antisemitism does not meaningful exist today, especially in the United States or Israel. What then is the condition of Jews in the world today in view of their history of oppression and persistent antisemitism that does not necessarily drive oppression.
Traditionally, in Europe, the hatred of Jewish people resulted in oppression.
p. 160: Magid does not feel that the terrorist attacks by the Palestinian people constitute oppression or even antisemitism. These acts are the lashing out of an oppressed people against their oppressors.
Arendt’s three categories of racism:
- Private racism
- Exclusionary racism
- De jure racism, where legislation consigns a particular group to a diminished social and economic existence.
p. 165: Oppression is hatred coupled with power.
Magid moves on to cite three theorists about antisemitism in the US.
- Aviva Cantor, “The Oppression of America’s Jews,” She feels that Jews, in the process of becoming White, lose something essential about their Jewishness. This is a subtle form of oppression because it threatens the future existence of the Jewish practice in the US. Assimilationism is the conditioning and programming of the Jews to ethnic amnesia. Magid feels that Cantor overstates the impact that social assimilation into the American way of life. It does not require religious conversion to Christianity. Cantor is aware that part of Jewish identity is difference. The kosher regulations are part of this. Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg said that the “only thing more dangerous for Jews than antisemitism, is no antisemitism.” (p. 177). At length, Magid rejects much of Cantor’s argument. The pressure to assimilate into American life, changing one’s name or facial features is much less than it was years ago. Multiculturalism celebrates difference and the soft oppression of fitting in is much less insidious to Jewish flourishing than it once was.
- David Baddiel’s, “Jews Don’t Count” is a short and shallow book which says that Jews are victims of the success of their cause. By assimilating successfully, Jewish people have lost their status as an at-risk group and thus are now ignored by White leftists.
- Elad Lapidot’s, “Jews Out of the Question.” This thinker advances the idea of anti-antisemitism. This is the conundrum of not being able either to praise or criticize Jews without being accused of antisemitism. The endless conversation erases Jewish people.
Both Baddiel and Lapidot’s ideas of antisemitism appear too frivolous to focus on in comparison to Cantor’s.
p. 191: Magid now moves to instances of anti-Jewish violence or action in situations where Jews are the dominant group. Jews have their own history of violence against non-Jews. The terrorist group, Hamas’s recent spectacular attack on citizens is an example of a people oppressed by Israel lashing out against Israel. This gives us a complex situation. Jews are victims and perpetrators.
p. 197: He argues here that the term “antisemitism” is not applicable in the situation of Palestinian violence towards the oppressive Israeli government and the oppression they have visited upon Gaza. Might we say that what Hamas did in November was a natural and understandable lashing out against the oppressing power over their lives?
Nobody should call justifiable criticism of Jews “antisemitism.” Antisemitism is hatred of Jews qua Jews; it has no justification, nor should it evoke any sympathy. In a context in which violence can be understood as motivated by other (often quite obvious) reasons, antisemitism should not be used as an explanation, and certainly not as a weapon to invalidate any understandable violent contestation against oppression. In short, if it can be “understood” (in Eisen’s terms, regarding Zionist violence), we should not call it antisemitism. (p. 198).
Hannah Arendt and David Engel have warned us against recklessly expanding the term “antisemitism,” in part because it too easily becomes weaponized as a tool to delegitimize or undermine legitimate critiques of individual Jews, or of Israel.
Have we recklessly expanded the term racism? Or does it continue to be useful in helping us to move to a broader understanding as say embodied by CRT.
Chapter 8: “Exile in the Land”
p. 203: He begins this chapter by introducing the term “post-Zionism.” Post Zionism began in the 1980s with several concurrent factors, including a new generation of historians, the defeat of communism, the rise of American capitalism and the post-liberal consensus which minimized stark Jewish identity. It was in this period that the oppression of Palestinians accelerated.
“Each began as a secular movement of largely elite historians and critical theorists who challenged a dominant historical narrative (in Zionism, Jewish emancipation; in post-Zionism, Jewish nationalism); then, over time, each ideology spawned religious iterations that subsequently came to dominate the discourse as a whole.” (p. 204).
I’m intrigued by the insight that what begins as a secular movement takes on religious dimensions. Both the Zionist movement and now the post-Zionist movement began as political and were deepened by religion.
This chapter, will focus on the work of Rav Shagar. Rav Kook, of the late 19th early 20th century, held an articulate and extreme view of the necessity of Jewish statehood, was the rabbi who gave Zionism a mystical dimension.
P. 206: He moves into Shagar’s crucial essay “Religious Post Zionism.” He begins by establishing that Zionism was a secular project from the beginning. Rav Kook’s spiritualization of it lent it the gravitas of religion, but ultimately was only the surface covering of what was essentially political.
p. 209: “Zionism, even for those who view it as the next stage of redemption, is unequivocally a secular project that emerged alongside many other modern nationalist movements in mid-nineteenth century Europe.” (p. 210).
Zionism at least begins as a secular project.
p. 210: Shagar views Zionism as Israel’s version of nationalism and religious nationalism which focuses on “blood,” language, land, and indigeneity. Further, Shagar holds that Zionism’s purpose was to create a state in the Land of Israel. Now that a land exists, the task is to get along with the neighbors.
p. 211: Shagar sought a postmodern framework for Israel. Shagar is no philosopher of postmodernism, but he used the term in a manner that suited him. He seized upon postmodernity’s critique of the grand narrative.
Excursus: Reading this gives me language with which to describe what is going on in America. The greatness of America that the nationalist project yearns for is excessively simplistic. There probably was no time that was so wonderful or universally happy that historians will describe it as the zenith of American civilization.
Post modernity centers on multiplicity, fracture, deconstruction, uncertainty, and ambivalence. Israel or Judaism is not simply one thing. Any international Jewish attempt to recover an imagined ideal civilization or faith in the Land of Israel will founder on this complex take on Jewish identity doomed. Zionism is obsolete.
Zionism can no longer survive postmodern critique.
Excursus: Reading Magid is a window into the rabbinic style of thinking. He follows tradition by paying respectful attention to the opinions that have come before even ones he disagrees with.
Shagar, a student of Nahman, gives a fresh way to envision Jewish nativity in the Land of Israel.
p. 212: This vision does not exclude the Palestinians or Heredim. Shagar’s vision holds that all narratives in Israel are equally valid—a position not possible for Zionists or at least Zionists who press for a dominating state of Israel.
p. 213: The Palestinian view that the land is stolen is equally valid. Each collective or population or people in Israel must find a way to live outside the hegemony of any one harmonized narrative. Zionism can’t do this. And it hasn’t.
Shagar rejects the grand narrative but maintains the importance of the land—the religious importance somehow in S’s view, the Land is in exile.
p. 214: It is devotion to Torah that replaces occupation of the land. Zionism, simply moving in hasn’t and doesn’t work. By “torah” Shagar means a spiritual mystical Torah, which is connection with God. “In this Torah the Land of Israel” is always in an exilic state.” Shagar’s foundation is the Hasidic-Kabbalistic tradition.
This book’s message is that Zionism, the project of Jews living in and maybe governing, Palestine is not working, but the idea of a safe and prosperous homeland is essential to Judaism. The concreteness of Canaan before the Exile cannot be restored.
p. 215: Israel will always be in an Exilic state until the end times. Kook equated state and sanctity. He extolled a unification of Judaism that is not a mixture of exile and homeland existence but post exile holiness.
Shagar’s is the unsatisfying vision of a fractured Judaism.
Excursus: One of the dreams of Christian nationalism is of a unified Christianity. The impulse of early monasticism was an attempt to recover the element of separation and to resist the pressure to be absorbed into Roman culture. Adolph Hitler never really believed in Christianity. He co-opted it as a temporary measure to draw German churchgoers into the Nazi project.
Inequality is inherent in the Zionist state, as it would be in a post-constitutional America. White American Christian elites would exclude any non-Christian or immigrant group. Magid sees the nationalistic/Zionist impulse as under pressure for simplification, much like the resurgence of Americanism following the 9/11 attacks.
Zionism and white Christian nationalism are colonial in nature.
p. 219: Politics as redemptive. Kook believed in a kind of political salvation.
p. 220: Post-modernism makes the mystical possible—Shagar.
Excursus: White Christian Nationalists would make America an anachronism.
“Claims of objectivity as sources of power.” The Torah itself deconstructs claims of objectivity.
The idealized Torah is only a Torah of exile. Nature has a role in all of this. Redemption in Kook (and others) alters nature.
Excursus: there appears to be some kind of connection between Creation theology and the Land in Judaism. Christianity, so far as I know, has completely dispensed with Land as a crucial element in redemption. The Land of Israel appears to be an idealized form of nature. Maybe God’s redemptive plans for Creation as a whole are realized in Israel first. Alternatively, the Land, may be a
Maimonides <–à Nazal, Nahman, Bratslav
Rav Kook
(these are representative thinkers on opposite sides)
p. 222: Much of the reflection cited in various rabbis is speculation about the contemporary meaning of the promise of land. Is land the physical territory of Palestine or is it a state of mind.
Magid moves to a complex idea, namely, that the mystical deconstructed character of the Land is also exilic in character. He returns to the idea that Zionism as a physical state is anachronistic and violent.
p. 223: Jews and the world in general must deconstruct Israel as it exists today. He loses me here. He is indeed favoring, I guess, deconstructed, mystical Zionism to preserve the element of land in Jewish faith. This means a critique of those who simply accept existence in the diaspora as a permanent state.
p. 224: When Zionism is used to “negate exile” then it is running down the wrong path. Exile always needs to be a part of Judaism. Even in Palestine. To achieve the possibility of exile in Palestine, Zionism (Judaism?) needs to be deconstructed. It must no longer be an ideal unity and settled goal. There is further the issue of nature. Jewish eschatology envisions some transformation of nature itself (which communicates or imputes salvation to residents of the Land.
p. 225: He discusses the Israel, evacuation of Jewish settlements in recent years saying that when the government attacks its own citizens Zionism is negated.
p. 226: Exile is more than displacement. It can be the holding of a yet-to-be realized dream.
p. 229: Magid assumes that the reader agrees that Exile is essential to Jewish existence. I’m certainly ready to do so, but not on the basis of recent rabbinic reflection. I want something from the OT that affirms that exile is a norm for Jews. I’m really wanting to read Brueggemann’s The Land.
p. 233: I’d also appreciate a definition of messianic. Magid uses this term as pertaining to an idealized condition without the centralized figure of a messiah individual.
p. 235: Of the ten things in Shagar’s speech, it is notable that God will bring involve animals and nature.
p. 236: Excursus: Isn’t Jesus’ ministry a declaration that the existing world is continuous with the world to come? There doesn’t need to be an event which cancels the world of now in order to receive a new order of the miraculous. The kingdom of God is at hand.
p. 239: Shagar appears to be saying that this present world and the world to come will be remarkably similar. One difference will be…
p. 240: The study of Torah appears to be a prelude to a greater “knowledge” which is knowing God, i.e. loving God and loving with God.
p. 242: To summarize, Shagar draws heavily from Maimonides to affirm that in the world to come there will be no disruption in the daily flow of life. What will be a universal “sick with love” state toward God. This will influence everyone’s attitudes towards one another. Nature will not be disrupted.
p. 243: Shagar cites the call of Abraham to migrate to Canaan as indication that Exile is essential and existed at the beginning of Israel’s experience. “Naturalism of Maimonides.” It appears that nature itself gives virtue to p0eople, a property which is especially true of the Land of Israel.
p. 245: For Nahman, the world itself does not convey redemption, but receives it. Nature is redeemed. I’d name this a Jewish creation mysticism.
p. 246: During the exile, Jews built homes between heaven and earth. This gave them residency. Maybe citizens with the whole earth. It avoided negative interaction with neighbors.
Excursus: Interesting how Edwin Friedman , himself a rabbi, learned about and spoke of differentiation so deeply.
p. 247: Shagar reflects on the idea of a border that separates or joins one people, Israel, with others.
p. 248: Shagar moves now to reflect on what happens when the spiritual “land of Israel” becomes a political (real) one.
The Kibbutz movement
The diaspora or exilic condition exists in a differentiated state alongside of other cultures. The very structure of Israel next to others is one of peace. It is almost as if the mission of Israel shows up in its existence and differentiation from the cultures around.
p. 251: So, Shagar’s ideal is the result of the evolution of Rav Kooks Zionism as dominant nation state into a multicultural liberal democracy where Jews can co-exist alongside of Arabs and others without dominating them. This posture prizes an idealized spiritual land of Israel that will only become realized at the end of all things. In other words, the Land of Israel is an eschatological reality. Shagar is using postmodernity as a handle for his ideas, rather than in any technical philosophical sense.
p. 254: Relativism, of course, must prevail in the above scheme. Ironically, the one truth is the “certainty of the relative.” The “postmodern crisis” –so much in American politics is a response to this. Shagar says that a new openness follows the deconstruction.
p. 255: The fact that Palestinian Arabs love the land does not necessarily need to blemish the Jewish love of and reverencing of the land.
The Necessity of Exile
p. 259: The Zionist movement and many contemporary Jews simply reject the idea of Exile as a positive thing. Even comfortable American Jews commonly6 believe that there is something wrong with living in the Jewish diaspora or exile! (Ultimately, Magid is saying that it is possible, given a postmodern outlook, to live an exilic existence in the Land of Israel.
p. 264: At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20the centuries was agreement among Jewish theologians that “exile” was not the operative category of Jewish existence. With safety in America, Jews worldwide lived in diaspora.
Excursus: The extreme Zionists, who believe that it is a sin not to live in Israel reinforce in my mind the generosity of Christianity that admits all inquirers with baptism.
p. 267: Hasidic Exile. His example of this form of Exile is drawn from Brooklyn and the conflict between two Hasidic communities, that of Rabbis’ Schneerson and Rabbi Teitelbaum. Schneerson (Lubavitchers) intellectual mystics; Satmar…
p. 270: Both saw America as a new promised land from which the old promised land could be redeemed. Both rabbis thought that the degree of Exile was reaching its end as the world approaches the threshold of the messianic era. Immigrating to the land of Israel was not urgent…yet. The world was close to but had not arrived at the messianic age. Both then were anti-Zionist.
p. 271: Bring Jews to Israel was “nefarious.” Teitelbaum saw Jews in the diaspora as having a role in ushering in the messianic age. I saw Zionism as anti-messianic.
p. 274: Teitelbaum: God sent Israel into Exile to purify the places where they were dispersed to purify the air of the Gentiles. Israel’s sin necessitated that they settled right in with the non-Jews. Your punishment is that you have to live with the “other.” The whole idea of “decree of exile” is important here. In the minds of Teitelbaum and it has not expired.
p. 276: There is a merger here between the missionary consciousness and punishment. Adam and Eve’s expulsion cited as example. Schneerson, while not anti-Zionist was a committed theological diasporist. He held that the work of diaspora needed to be complete in order for the Messiah to come. Neither T. nor S gave the Aland of Israel a character of sanctity. Thus, one could reside in Israel and still be in Exile.
Excursus: The Jews have a unique and compelling view of exile, a condition that Christians share. There is something about their presence in their brokenness that fulfills their vocation to be co-creators. This theology says something about presence. There is a prizing of the secular world here.
p. 278: The Jewish exile to America is at once a great dissent and a great ascent. Schneerson: Open Secret.
p. 279: It is as if America has exceeded Israel in an eschatological significance.
p. 280: Only in America could Kiryas Joel exist—the town in upstate NY filled with Hasidic Jews who live in poverty.
p. 282: Isaac Singer and Yiddish, the Language of Exile. He lived in early 20th century Poland and moved to America. Singer sees Jews as beautiful and interesting because of Exile.
Singer sees Jews as beautiful and interesting as a result of Exile.
p. 285: Singer thought Yiddish and not modern Hebrew was the true language of exile. Yiddish was banished from the newly founded Israel at its inception. Yiddish expressed Jewish longing. It as many other languages of exile expressed something essential to the Jewish soul.
Exile and Ethics
Rabbi Tamares (1869 – 1931) became disenchanted with Zionism because it “normalized the Jewish people as one among other nations.”
p. 291: The idea that living pacifistically outside the realm of the political.
p. 292: Exile is the operating motif of Judaism’s greatness.” Jews, and I believe Christians too, need to recover a theology of Exile.
p. 293: Tamares: Sees Exile as promoting spirituality and therefore not a great loss for Jews. When Jews become like the other nations, they lose their essential identity and reason for existence. “Dare to be Different.”
p. 296: The Jewish people retain an abnormal quality.
p. 299: Ultimately Magid is arguing against all forms of Zionism, much less Jewish statehood in Israel.
[i] Books mentioned: Eisen, Arnold: Galut: Modern Jewish Reflection on Homelessness and Homecoming, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin: “Exile Within Sovereignty: Critique of ‘The Negation of Exile’ in Israeli Culture,” Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism, Daniel Boyarin, The No State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto, “The Colonial Drag: Zionism, Gender, and Mimicry,” in Unheroic Conduct , Rav Shagar, Briti Shalom, Edward Said: Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Documentary “1913: Seeds of Conflict,” Peter Beinart: The Crisis of Zionism, Marjorie Feld: Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism, Adam Rovner: In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel, Judith Butler, Parting Ways, Aviva Cantor, “The Oppression of America’s Jews,” David Baddiel, “Jews Don’t Count,” Elad Lapidot, “Jews Out of the Question: A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism,” Antony Lerman, Whatever Happened to Antisemitism? Podcasts: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-chris-hedges-report-with-rabbi
